Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  Njal sat opposite Sven beneath a stained glass window that showed stars through a portrait of the apotheosis of the Emperor into the Throne of Eternal Life. Njal had his hands folded as if in prayer, his fine ascetic features were composed and calm. Sven guessed that he was sub-vocalising the Litany Against Fear.

  ‘Why didn’t Hauptman send in his house troops?’ asked Egil, his bulldog face set in its characteristic permanent sneer. Of all the Space Wolf cadets he was the most flawed. His eyes held the cold, frozen, madness so characteristic of troll-blooded berserkers. He had broken two of Sven’s ribs during unarmed combat practice back on Fenris and smiled coldly as the younger scout was carried to the apothecarion. Sven had overheard Sergeant Hakon tell Brother-Captain Thorsen that he would be keeping a special eye on Egil. Whether that was good or bad, Sven had never decided.

  ‘The guards were probably too scared to travel in this rust-bucket they call a boarding torpedo. By the ghost of Leman Russ, I can’t say I blame them.’ This came from Gunnar, the squad support man who grinned amiably as he said it. He smiled, revealing the specially lengthened incisors that were the mark of the Space Wolf gene-seed. There was something reassuring about Gunnar’s broken-nosed, heavily pock-marked features, Sven thought.

  Hakon let out a short bark of mirthless laughter. ‘When you have seen as much combat in the Emperor’s service as those Guardsmen have then you will be true Space Marines. Till then, mock them not. Simply thank the Emperor for providing you with this chance to show your own bravery.’

  ‘I hope this thing is full of deviants.’ Egil said with relish. ‘I’ll prove my bravery soon enough.’

  Gunnar slapped a cartridge into his weapon. ‘Don’t worry, Njal, we’ll see you’re safe.’

  Sven knew that Gunnar was just teasing. The worried expression on Njal’s face made it plain that he did not.

  ‘I can look after myself.’ he said sharply.

  Gunnar clapped him on the shoulder of his armour and laughed. ‘I know you can, little brother. I know you can.’

  ‘Final checks.’ Sergeant Hakon said. Each Marine fell silent as he concentrated on the prayers necessary to activate his armour.

  Sven knew that his suit was well-maintained. He had carried out all the maintenance rituals himself, washing the armour with scented oils while intoning the Litany Against Corrosion, greasing the articulated joints with blessed unguents, checking the pipes of the rebreather with coloured smoke from an auto-censer. He believed firmly in the old Space Marine saying, if you look after your equipment it will look after you.

  Yet it went deeper than that. He knew that the armour he had been given was really only loaned to him. He felt a sense of reverence for the ancient artefact. It had been worn by a hundred generations of Space Wolves before his birth and would be worn by a hundred more after his death. He was part of a family of Wolves that stretched off into the fathomless future. When he touched the armour he touched the living history of his Chapter.

  Now, as he touched each command rune in turn, he tried to imagine the previous wearers of the armour. Each, like him, had been chosen from the blond haired seafarer clans of the island chains of Nordheim. Each, like him, had undergone the years-long basic training of the Space Marine. Each, like him, had undergone the implantation of the various bio-systems that had transformed them into a superman far stronger, faster and more resilient than an ordinary mortal. Some had gone on to glory; others had died in this armour. Sven had often wondered which group he would belong to when his time came. Now the sense of foreboding he had felt when he first saw the alien artefact returned.

  He was aware how much he relied on this armour for protection. Its ceramite carapace to protect him from heat and cold and enemy fire. Its auto-sensory systems that let him see in the darkness. Its recycling mechanisms that let him breath in hard vacuum and survive for weeks on his own reconstituted excrement. As these thoughts filtered into his mind, his prayers moved from being an empty recital of a well-worn litany into something genuine and sincere. He did not want to die and perhaps his suit might save him.

  He fitted the comm-net ear-bead into place and checked the position of the speaking circlet over his larynx. He bowed his head and prayed that the ship’s Tech-Adepts had taken as much care of the equipment as his order’s own lay-brothers would. Once inside the alien artefact it might be his only means of communication with his fellow scouts.

  He pushed his hands together in prayer, feeling the muscle amplification of the suit’s exoskeleton lend him the strength of dozens. He closed his eyes and let the pheromone traces of his companions be picked up by the suit’s receptors. He knew that if the alien artefact was pressurised he could identify his companions, even in total darkness, by scent alone. With an act of will he switched his hearing from normal sound to comm-net pickup. The sub-vocalised activation litanies of his companions rang in his ears, interspersed with the comms chatter of the ship’s crew.

  ‘Helmets on.’ the sergeant said. In turn the Space Marines donned their protective headgear. One by one, each gave the thumbs up sign. When his turn came Sven did the same. He felt the click of the helmet lock as it slid into place. Targeting icons appeared in his sight underneath the Gothic script of his head-up display. All the read-outs were fine. He gave the signal. The sergeant put his own helm on last.

  ‘All clear. The Emperor is served.’ Hakon said for them all.

  ‘The Blessing of the Holy One upon you.’ responded the ship’s controller. There was a hiss and a fine mist filled the air as the cabin was depressurised. The external temperature dropped sharply; a frost-blue icon flashed an appropriate warning. It clicked for three heartbeats to indicate a lack of air-pressure. There was another click from the neckband of the armour. Sven knew that his helmet had locked into place and could not now be removed until his suit had checked the atmosphere and found it safe for breathing.

  There was a faint kick of acceleration. For a moment Sven felt weightless as the boarding torpedo left the artificial gravity field of the Spiritus Sancti, then a fraction of his normal weight returned as the torpedo accelerated. In the view monitors the starship showed first as a vast metal wall. As it receded, the turrets that studded its exterior became visible, then the whole ship from winged stern to dragon-beaked prow. The sheer size of the ship was obvious from the hundreds of great arched windows, each of which Sven knew was the length of a whaling ship and taller than its mast. The rogue trader’s ancient vessel dwindled until it was nearly lost amid the stars, just one point of light among many. In the flickering green forward monitors, the alien object swelled ominously in size.

  ‘There’s no turning back now.’ he heard Njal mutter.

  ‘Good,’ Egil said.

  With a violent, lurching shudder, the boarding torpedo lodged itself in the wall of the alien artefact. Sven opened his eyes and ceased praying. He hit the quick release amulet on the restraining straps and floated free for a moment before the boarding torpedo’s artificial gravity returned.

  The squad had moved to ready positions covering the forward bulkhead doors with all their weapons. Vibration thrummed through the soles of Sven’s boots as the boarding torpedo’s drilling nose-cone bored into the other vessel’s walls. After a moment the motion ceased.

  +Squad, ready to disperse!+ Hakon’s voice came clear over the comm-link.

  +Opus Dei!+ the squad responded.

  The bulkhead doors swung open and the scouts covered the area with their weapons, just as they had practised a thousand times in training. Sven braced himself as air rushed into the torpedo, misting as it hit the chill within the vehicle.

  +Ghost of Russ!+ someone breathed. +I don’t believe it.+

  Their helmet lights revealed an awesome vista. They stared down into a vast corridor, as high as the chapel ceiling on the Spiritus Sancti and the colour of fresh meat. The walls were not smooth and regular; they looked rough and were covered in innumerable folds, like the exposed surface of the brain the medics had shown him du
ring his novitiate. The walls glistened with pink mucous.

  From each fold of the wall protruded thousands of multicoloured cilia, each metres long and as fine as titanite thread. They swayed like ferns in a breeze. Here and there huge, muscle-like sacs pulsed. Orifices in the wall opened and shut in time with their pulsing, making sounds like fast laboured breaths. Sven guessed that they were circulating air. Fluid gurgled through transparent pipes that lined the walls like great veins.

  +Looks like the place is inhabited,+ Gunnar said. His voice sounded too loud over the comm-link.

  SPORES DANCED AND glittered in the air, catching the light and twinkling like stars in the void of space. As they responded to the helmet lights, they seemed to ignite with phosphorescence, like fireflies, and the glow became dazzling. Sven blinked and his second, translucent eyelids dropped into place, filtering the light back to a manageable level. His armour’s glowlamps dimmed automatically as the ambient light increased.

  While Gunnar covered them, Egil and Njal moved forward, following a standard, well-drilled pattern. As they left the torpedo, their feet sank into the spongy floor of the alien vessel. They walked as if on a thick carpet, disturbing the waving cilia. Sven wondered whether the fronds were some sort of early warning device or whether they might even be poisonous.

  The atmosphere icon on his display flashed green three times and then settled. There was a click as the neck-lock of his helmet released. Sven advanced into the alien vessel, flexing his knees to compensate for the gravity shift. The ship seemed to be generating its own internal gravity with centripetal force from its rotation. Even so, Sven felt as if he were only half his normal weight.

  Sergeant Hakon had already undone his helmet, and stood taking several deep breaths. He grimaced as his bio-engineered system adapted to the local conditions. Sven knew that he would soon be acclimatised to the local conditions and immune to any toxins present in the atmosphere. After a long, tense minute, Hakon gestured for them all to remove their helms.

  The first thing that surprised Sven was how warm it was. The air seemed almost blood heat. He started to sweat as his body compensated for the temperature and the humidity. He coughed as the membranes within his gullet filtered out the airborne spores. The sparkling colours of his surroundings filled his sight; the inside of the ship was a riot of hues glowing with phosphorescent fire in the vessel’s warm, shadowy interior.

  He was reminded of the coral reefs around the equator on Nordheim where the Space Wolves kept their summer palaces, far from the icy mountains and glaciers of Fenris. He had often gone swimming through the reefs after the battle exercises on the warmer tropical islands. The walls reminded him of certain formations of hard coral. He wondered whether this ship had been created from similar creatures, colonies of microscopic organisms joined to form one vast structure. Everything looked tranquil; it seemed safe and relaxing.

  Suddenly, something lashed past him and stung his face. He flinched and reflexively swung his pistol up and fired. The bolter kicked in his hand as it released its missile. In the brief second between pulling the trigger and watching the thing explode, he caught sight of what looked like a metre-wide jellyfish, drifting parachute-like on the air currents. His face went numb as bio-systems moved to cope with the toxin.

  ‘Careful.’ said Sergeant Hakon. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find here.’ He moved over to Sven and passed a medical amulet over the wound. The small gargoyle headed talisman did not flicker. It gave no warning chime.

  ‘You seem to be coping.’ Hakon said calmly. At the sound of the shot the rest of the Space Wolves had taken up positions facing outward covering all lines of fire. Nothing obvious menaced them. No more floating jellyfish came in sight.

  The ceiling had started to glow; long veins of bio-luminescent tubing had flickered to life as if in response to the presence of the scouts. They illuminated the corridor which curved downwards out of sight. Sven was reminded of the inside of a snail’s shell.

  Sven felt slightly nauseous as the tailored antibodies of his bloodstream dealt with whatever invaders the alien creature had injected. He was struck by a comparison. Perhaps the jellyfish thing had been an antibody responding to the appearance of the scouts.

  He tried to dismiss the thought as mere fancy but the thought kept returning that perhaps the alien ship had other ways of dealing with intruders.

  THEY ADVANCED CAUTIOUSLY through the pulsing dark. Their cat-like eyes had adjusted to the gloom. They kept their weapons ready to deal death. At every turn and junction they left comm-link relays. These kept them in touch with the Spiritus Sancti and served as navigation beacons.

  ‘Ghost of Russ!’ Sven cursed, slipping and falling on the mucus-covered floor. The spongy surface absorbed the impact as he rolled back into a crouch. Njal moved over to make sure he was all right. Sven could see the look of concern on his face. He waved his friend away, almost embarrassed by the fall.

  ‘We are in the belly of leviathan.’ Njal said, studying walls the colour of bruised flesh. Sven grimaced; the rotten meat stench of their surroundings made him want to gag. He glanced round.

  In the dim light, the other Space Marines were spectral, ghostly figures. Gunnar was on point duty; the rest of the scouts straggled back in a long line behind him. The sergeant brought up the rear. Breathing sacs deflated and a stream of mist and spores erupted forth, refracting the light from the scouts’ armour, turning it into rainbows.

  ‘I never much cared for that story, brother.’ Sven said quietly, wiping mucus from his armour. His father loved telling him the old tale: of the fisherman, Tor, who was swallowed by the giant sea-monster leviathan and lived in its vast belly for fifty days before being rescued by the original Space Wolf Terminators and being asked to join their order. His father had used it to frighten Sven and his brothers to keep them from stealing out to sea on their makeshift rafts. At least he had, until the day when he had set out on his dragonship and never returned. As a child, Sven had always suspected that leviathan had got him.

  When he had finally become a cadet, he had laughed at such childish stories. He had consulted the archivum of the Order and discovered that the story of Tor and the leviathan was a truly ancient tale, one dating back to before the Imperium, to the distant, time-lost days of primordial Earth. It existed in one form or another on many Imperium worlds, a distant trace memory of a time before humanity colonised the galaxy. He had never thought to be troubled by it again.

  Now, within the bowels of this alien ship, he found the horror of the ancient tale had returned to him. He could hear his father’s rasping voice speaking in the darkness of the longhouse as the winter gales howled outside. He remembered the chill that filled him when the old man had dwelt on the nauseating things found in the sea monster’s belly.

  He recalled as well looking out to sea on stormy nights when gale-driven waves lashed the black rocks and imagining huge monsters, bigger than his home island lurking beneath the sea. It was the memory of his strongest boyhood fear and now it returned to haunt him. He felt the same way now; all around he sensed the presence of a huge, waiting monster.

  All around him in the gloom he sensed presences. Overhead, he thought he heard the flapping of wings. When he glanced up he was startled to see dark forms like a shoal of manta rays, flapping along the ceiling. As he watched, they vanished into orifices in the flesh wall.

  Fluids gurgled through the pipe-veins around him. He was within some vast living being and he knew it for certain now. And he was sure that it knew of his presence in some dim, instinctual way, sensed him and resented his intrusion. There was a sense of evil, malign intelligence about this alien vessel. It was a presence inimical to humanity and any other form of life.

  Sven felt an almost claustrophobic terror. His heartbeat sounded like thunder in his ears. His breath seemed louder than the breathing of the valves of the ship. He fingered the hilt of his mono-molecular knife uneasily and recited the comforting words of the Imperial Litany to himself. I
n this place, at this time, the words sounded hollow, empty. He met Njal’s gaze and saw the unvoiced fear there too. Neither of them had expected their first mission to be like this.

  ‘Move on, brothers.’ Hakon’s voice seemed to come from far away Sven forced himself to move deeper into the darkness.

  FROM THE MOMENT he had set foot on this alien ship, Njal had known he was doomed to die. More than any of his companions, he was aware of the strangeness of this vessel and the fact that it was alive. He knew that it was dormant at present but it would take only the slightest of actions to waken it. It was only a matter of time. He felt it in his bones.

  Ever since he had been a child, that feeling of unconquerable dread had continually been proved correct. Njal had never been wrong. He had watched Sven’s father’s ship, the Waverider, set sail that fatal morning knowing it would never return. He had wanted to warn them but he knew that it was useless. Each man aboard had been marked for death and it was unavoidable. And so it came to pass.

  He had watched a party of hunters led by Ketil Strongarm disappear into the mountains above Orm’s Fjord. The stink of death was upon them. He had wanted to warn them not to go. He knew without being able to explain why they would never return. Two days later, word came back that Ketil and all his brothers had been killed by an avalanche.

  The night that his mother had died Njal had sensed the presence of death, swooping like an immense, midnight-black hawk to carry the old woman away. The whalehunter shaman had assured his father that the fever had broken. Njal knew differently and in the cold, mist-strangled morning he had been proved correct. He had not cried as the pall-bearers were summoned. He had said his farewells long before in the darkness.

  He worried about his inability to speak, at what had locked his lips. He had been unable to talk about his forebodings even with his tutors in the Space Wolves’ citadel. In later years he had worried that it was pride. His gift had set him apart from the others and if he had warned them, he would have proven it wrong. Perhaps the future was fixed and there was nothing any man could do about it; or perhaps he wanted to be correct, needed the secret, almost proud knowledge of his own uniqueness. He smiled bleakly to himself. Many and subtle were the traps of daemons.